Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Eileen Fisher has been one of our favorite lines forever. She always has nice clean lines in wonderful fabrics. The pieces I own personally have been favorites in my wardrobe for years and I am always looking to add to those "go to" items. I love this interview with Eileen, how she got started, her philosophy and her favorites...

Eileen Fisher and the art of understatement.

There
is a wish shared by women who consider themselves serious that the
clothes they wear look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than
anxiously selected. The clothes of Eileen Fisher seem to have been
designed with the fulfillment of that wish in mind. Words like “simple”
and “tasteful” and colors like black and gray come to mind along with
images of women of a certain age and class—professors, editors,
psychotherapists, lawyers, administrators—for whom the hiding of vanity
is an inner necessity.

The first Eileen Fisher
shop opened in 1987, on Ninth Street in the East Village. Today, Eileen
Fisher is an enterprise with nearly a thousand employees. The clothes
sell in department stores and catalogues as well as in six Eileen Fisher
shops in Manhattan and fifty-five throughout the country. Over the
years, the clothes have become less plain and more like the clothes in
fashion. Some of the older Eileen Fisher customers grouse about these
changes. They want the clothes to remain the same, as if anything can.
Surely not clothes.
I
remember going into the Eileen Fisher shops that were opening around
the city in the late nineteen-eighties and never buying anything. I was
attracted by the austere beauty of the clothes. They were loose and long
and interesting. There was an atmosphere of early modernism in their
geometric shapes and murky muted colors. You could see Alma Mahler
wearing them around the Bauhaus. But you could not wear them yourself if
you weren’t fairly stately. After a few years, the clothes changed and
began to suit small thin women as well as tall substantial ones. But
their original atmosphere remained. I joined a growing cadre of women
who regularly shop at Eileen Fisher and form a kind of cult of the
interestingly plain.
One day in February, I went
to talk with Eileen Fisher at her house, in Irvington, New York, and
was immediately struck by her beauty. She does not look like a woman who
is uninterested in her appearance. She looks glamorous and stylish. She
is slender and fine-boned. Her straight, completely white hair is cut
in a geometric chin-length bob. She wears dark-rimmed glasses. Her
features are delicate, and there is a certain fragility about her, an
atmosphere of someone who needs protection. And she came to the
interview protected, by two executives in her company: Hilary Old, the
vice-president for communications, and Monica Rowe, the director of
public relations. I was received in a large light room that looks out on
the Hudson River and its distant shore (the river is magnificently wide
here) through a picture window. A lunch of choice dishes—crab cakes,
rice salad, a salad of winter squash and goat cheese—had been laid out
on a long table. Eileen (as I will call her, as one calls Hillary
Hillary) presented herself as someone who is still trying to overcome an
innate awkwardness and shyness and verbal tentativeness. “Speaking and
writing have always been hard for me,” she said as her colleagues looked
on fondly and encouragingly, as if at a relative with an endearing
quirk.
She apologized for the lunch that clearly
needed no apology. But she had planned to serve sushi prepared by her
Japanese cook, who had been called away at the last minute. That Eileen
Fisher had a Japanese cook did not surprise me; nor did the story she
told a few minutes later about a fateful chance encounter with a
Japanese designer who became her employer and lover. A sense of Japan
hovers over Eileen Fisher’s modernism (as it does, when you think about
it, over modernism itself).
When the encounter
with the Japanese designer took place, in the mid-nineteen-seventies,
she was a young woman from the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines (“Home of
McDonald’s, Anywhere, U.S.A.,” in her description) who had recently
graduated from the University of Illinois as a home-ec major and had
come to New York to become an interior designer. But she wasn’t
succeeding. “I wasn’t good with words,” she said. “I wasn’t that good
with people, either. I couldn’t explain my ideas to clients.” To support
herself, she waited on tables and also took small graphic-design jobs.
One day, while at a printing shop to which she had brought a design for
stationery, “this Japanese guy was also printing something, and he
looked at my design and liked it and said, ‘I’m a graphic designer, and I
need an assistant. Would you apply for the job?’ I applied and he hired
me and we ended up getting into a relationship. I moved in with
him—that was kind of a mistake—but the working part of it was a great
experience. His name was Rei. We went to Japan to work on advertising
projects for clients like Kirin beer and a large stationery company and a
big chemical company. We needed to present a lot of ideas, to throw in a
lot of stuff, so he had me throw in my designs. Then weird things would
happen, like they would pick my design. And he would get upset. I think
he thought I was this little assistant, I was nice and cute or whatever
I was. When they picked my design, it created a problem in our
relationship.” The relationship did not survive the problem (of her
talent), but the lesson of Japan stayed with Eileen: “I got inspired. I
saw the kimono. I saw it worn different ways. I saw all those little
cotton kimonos and those kimono things they wear in the rice paddies and
tie back and little flood pants. I was intrigued by the aesthetic of
Japan. The simplicity of it. I was already interested in simplicity from
interior design. And Rei was really minimal. But it was the kimono that
inspired me. The piece you’re wearing is an extension of the kimono.” The
piece I was wearing was a heavy, charcoal-gray wool cardigan sweater
that I bought at an Eileen Fisher shop six or seven years ago and rarely
wear because it is rarely cold enough to wear it. But the day was
bitterly cold and raw and windy, and it was not too warm inside to be
wearing it. The sweater is a remarkable garment. On the hanger it looks
like nothing—it is buttonless and ribbed and boxy—but when worn it
becomes almost uncannily flattering. Everyone who wears it looks good in
it. Eileen then said something surprising, namely that she had not
designed my sweater. Twenty years earlier, she had stopped designing;
she had turned this work over to a design team that has been doing it
ever since, at first under her supervision and now under that of a lead
designer.
“I stored that idea about the kimono,”
Eileen went on. “After Rei and I split up, I went about my business. I
tried to make a living. I did apartments, stationery, small things. I
designed a tofu package. But this idea kept haunting me, this clothing
thing, the kimono. I was living in Tribeca and had artist friends and
designer friends. I was dating a guy who was a sculptor. He was
designing jewelry, and he had taken a booth at a boutique show where
owners of small clothing stores from around the country come to New York
to buy clothes and accessories from small designers. He took me to the
show, and I remember looking around and going, ‘I could do this.’ I had
never designed any clothes, but I could picture it, I could see clothes I
had designed on the walls.”
At the next boutique
show, a few months later, Eileen took over the boyfriend’s booth. (He
had stopped making jewelry but had committed himself to the booth.) She
shared it with two other designers, since she couldn’t afford the rent
for the whole booth. “It was three weeks before the show, and I had no
clothes. I had to figure out what to do. I ended up hiring someone to
sew for me and make the first patterns.”
“You drew the designs?”
“No. I never learned how to draw. I found other garments that were similar, that kind of got me close.”
“What do you mean other garments?”
“Things that were in stores. That were similar to what I was thinking.”
“You bought these clothes?”
“Yes,
and I said to Gail, the woman who was making the patterns, it’s kind of
like this, but the neck is more like that, and it’s a little longer, or
it’s a little shorter, it’s a little wider, it’s got a long sleeve or a
shorter sleeve or something like that. It was going off of something
that existed. Gail sewed the clothes—there were four garments made of
linen—and I took them to the boutique show and hung them up. I remember
being terrified standing there and waiting for what people would say.
But everyone was kind, maybe because I was quiet and shy. I wanted to
know what the buyers thought, and they would tell me and I would
listen.”
Gail had been unimpressed with the
designs. “ ‘You have to have an idea, Eileen,’ she told me. ‘This is a
little boring. Put some piping on it or something.’ ” The
psychotherapist Eileen was then seeing was not encouraging, either. “She
felt I was making progress with my interior-design business. I was
learning to communicate and to express my needs and ask for payment and
other things that were hard for me to ask for. She thought that my
taking a divergent path was some kind of sabotaging behavior.” But
several buyers liked Eileen’s unadorned garments and ordered them, and
at the next boutique show buyers stood in line and wrote orders
amounting to forty thousand dollars. This was more than Gail could
manage, and a small factory in Queens was found to do the sewing. “We
cut the pieces and carried them in garbage bags on the subway to
Queens.”

Hilary
Old and Monica Rowe had been listening quietly while Eileen told this
history in answer to my questions. She had not touched her lunch, and,
so that she might do so, I questioned her companions about what they did
in the company. Rowe, a handsome African-American woman of forty-five
with an air of friendly reserve, had only recently joined the company.
“I’ve spent most of my career in corporate communications,” she said,
mentioning Sephora and Bath and Body Works as companies she had worked
for, and speaking admiringly of the “woman-friendly” ethos of Eileen
Fisher. Old, who is also forty-five, with a fresh open face and a manner
that is at once confident and modest, has been in the company for
eighteen years and rose through the ranks from a job as a saleswoman in
the White Plains store. She had majored in women’s studies at the
University of Colorado and came to the attention of higher-ups in the
company when she sent a letter to Eileen in which she expressed her
sense of the Eileen Fisher aesthetic as a “totally radical feminist
project” and proposed that the company connect itself with women’s
groups. She was steered toward a job in public relations, working on a
newsletter written in Eileen’s voice. A year later, she became Eileen’s
assistant. “I was lucky enough to have that role when the company was
going through hard times and had to reimagine and reorganize itself in
some profound ways,” Old said.

When
I asked about the hard times, and how they were surmounted, she and
Eileen spoke about the almost magical intervention of a woman named
Susan Schor, who arrived as if from Mt. Olympus, though she actually
only came from Pace University.
“It began as an
effort to give more structure to this almost feminine way of doing
things—I didn’t know how to run a business,” Eileen said. “You’re
looking at me as if I’m weird or something.”
I
said I was surprised to hear her say she didn’t know how to run a
business, since her enterprise was such a manifestly successful one.
“Weren’t you making a lot of money?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“That isn’t something associated with the feminine.”
“To me it was very intuitive. I was always good with numbers. I was good in math.”
“So if the company was doing well, why were you dissatisfied? What was lacking?”
Eileen
struggled to explain. Evidently, there was both a “need for more
structure” and insufficient “joy and well-being.” She told the story—now
a kind of legendary tale in the company annals—of the male C.E.O. who
had been hired during the period of wobbliness and discontent. “It was
clear after a few months that this was the wrong path. He was a lovely
guy. He would have been the right C.E.O. for our company if a C.E.O. was
the right role for our company. But it was the old paradigm of somebody
directing the action. I remember after a meeting going, ‘I don’t think
this is going to work.’ People would ask me, ‘Do we have to listen to
him when he tells us what to do?’ ”
“You yourself don’t like to tell people what to do,” I said.
“Right,
right,” Eileen said, and added, “I think it comes out of a family model
or something.” Earlier, Eileen had spoken of her family with a kind of
withering rue. She is the second oldest of seven children, six of them
girls. “We sort of raised ourselves,” she said. “My mother—I shouldn’t
describe it like this—but she was a little crazy. My father was an
accountant at Allstate Insurance. He was a quiet guy, kind of
disengaged.”
“So the model for the company was a family without parents.”
“Yes.
My parents weren’t in charge. With my six siblings, we ran the show. We
did what we did. My mother put food on the table and cleaned the house,
but she never told us what to do. She yelled at us more than anything,
but didn’t teach us things and didn’t really take charge.”
The incomparable Susan arrived a few years after the C.E.O. left. “What did Susan actually do?” I asked. Eileen
tried to say, but her reply was like a hermetic text by Judith Butler.
She spoke of a “core concept team” and “the leadership forum” and “this
kind of concept of facilitating leaders, which is that they’re actually
doing the work, they’re not leading the work, but sort of like the way
I’ve been leading from behind, in a way leading by, you know, letting
the group find what’s coming up and facilitating that to happen.” Once
again, she read my face and stopped herself: “You’re looking at me like
I’m crazy.”
I admitted that I had no idea what she was talking about.
Old
stepped in but was equally powerless to explain the inexplicable: “What
we’re trying to do with this different kind of leadership is to have
the leader facilitate the process, so you get the team or the craft team
in the room together, to ideate together, to generate the ideas
together, and then figure out who’s going to hold what, who’s going to
move what forward, so it’s less of, it’s more about kind of again the
holding the space for the team to find.”
The
talk gradually grew less opaque. But I noticed that whenever the
workings of the company came under discussion the language became
peculiar and contorted, as if something were being hidden. In fact, the
company has nothing to hide. It is remarkably benign and well
intentioned. It has a profit-sharing plan for its employees, whereby
twenty-nine per cent of the profits are given to them. The plan includes
the salespeople, who do not work on commission. (2012 was an
exceptionally profitable year, and every employee received the
equivalent of an extra eleven weeks of salary.) The salespeople are
expected to wear Eileen Fisher clothes to work, and are given five free
garments a month so that they may do so. (The clothes are not cheap;
they are priced in the “luxury” category, to which brands such as Ralph
Lauren and DKNY belong.)
Along with being
generous to its own employees, the company tries to help the workers in
the Chinese factories where most of the Eileen Fisher clothes are now
made; there is a director of social consciousness, who oversees the
inspection of those factories. In addition, there is a director of
sustainability, who is in charge of environmental exemplariness. The
company tries to be as green as it can without losing its shirt. For
example, fifty per cent of the cotton it uses comes from organic farms
that do not use pesticides, and dyes that are not toxic are preferred if
not always insisted on. Eileen takes justifiable pride in her company’s
good works and good intentions, and its esprit. However,
when Susan Schor arrived at the company, in 1999, it was slipping away
from Eileen. In 1988, she had married David Zwiebel, who owned two dress
shops in upstate New York and was one of the early buyers of Eileen
Fisher designs. After they married, Zwiebel joined Eileen at the
company. She credits him with a “watershed moment”: the opening of an
Eileen Fisher shop on Madison Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street. “David
found that location and really pushed for it,” she said. Before the
opening of the Madison Avenue shop, department stores had hesitated to
take Eileen Fisher designs; now they saw the point of doing so. Today,
department stores represent seventy per cent of the company’s business.
In the late nineties, the marriage ended, and Zwiebel left the company.
“That was a hard time,” Eileen recalled. “Everything was mixed up. It
sort of reminded me of that situation with the Japanese boyfriend. Why
do we repeat the same things?” After the separation, Eileen spent less
time at the company in order to be with her children, Zack and Sasha,
then eight and four.
On her return to the office
full time, a few years later, “Eileen no longer felt at home in her own
company,” Susan Schor said when I spoke with her at the company’s
headquarters, at 111 Fifth Avenue. “It had become more corporate, more
hierarchical, less collaborative, less caring. There was more
unhappiness, I’d say. People weren’t kind enough to each other.
Deadlines were more important than the process that led to the
deadlines.”
Schor is a handsome, vivacious,
articulate woman of sixty-seven. She was teaching courses on “leadership
skills” and “interpersonal skills” at the Pace business school when she
and Eileen met, at a birthday party, and felt an immediate rapport.
(Schor was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes.) Eileen confided her worries
about the company and “some questions she had about her own leadership.”
She invited Schor to visit the company and observe its workings. Schor
immediately recognized the power vacuum created by Eileen’s inability to
say a cross word to anyone. “It became clear to me that the company
needed someone with my background,” Schor said, “though it wasn’t going
to be me, because I loved being a tenured faculty member at Pace.” In
the end, Schor overcame her reluctance and took on the task she was so
well equipped to perform, of getting a C.E.O.’s grip on the company
while appearing to be doing nothing of the sort. Where the male C.E.O.
had failed, the female professor of the legerdemain of leadership
succeeded. Although Schor spoke regular English, and gave the air of
being completely forthcoming, she was almost as elusive as Eileen and
Old and Rowe had been when I tried to find out what, exactly, she had
done to “bring in a very caring, feminine style of leadership that
valued people working together, that valued coöperation rather than
competition, that made room for having a full life.” All that Schor
could tell me was that “it was not a happy place when I came,” and now
it is “a pretty happy organization that keeps getting happier and
happier.” At
the end of the Irvington lunch, which had been scheduled to dovetail
with another appointment, Eileen looked at her watch and proposed that I
stay a few minutes longer so I wouldn’t have to wait for my train on
the chilly outdoor platform—the train was due in fifteen minutes and the
station was only five minutes away. “Do you want to see the living
room?” she asked. Old, Rowe, and I followed her into a spacious room
with a kitchen at one end and beige sofas and armchairs and side tables
with books and magazines and attractive objects on them at the other.
Two cats curled up on cushions completed the picture of pleasing
domestic comfort.
I
noticed a third cat on the outside of one of the French doors that
lined a wall—standing on its hind legs, its paws eagerly pressed against
the glass—and asked if I should let him in. “Oh, no, please don’t do
that!” Eileen said. She explained that this cat was never let into the
house. He was the bad cat. He had once lived in the house with the other
cats, but he had fought with the second male cat and peed all over the
floor and when the housekeeper threatened to quit he was expelled from
the house and now lived outdoors. He was begging not to come in from the
cold, Eileen said, but to be fed. When I asked how he survived the
bitter winter weather, she said, “He goes under the house. He’s fine.
The vet said he’s the healthiest of my cats.”

When
I returned to Eileen’s house a few weeks later—this time after
lunch—Old and Rowe were on handmaiden duty again, but the interview took
place in a different room. A meeting was going on in the room where we
had eaten, and I was led to an upstairs room, lined with racks of Eileen
Fisher clothes, all in gray, black, and white. Eileen, again, looked
beautiful and elegant in a black ensemble of trousers and scoop-neck
sweater. “This is what I call my studio,” she said of the room,
explaining that it had once been her office but now served as an extra
meeting room and as a place where she tried on clothes. The racks of
gray and black and white clothes—Eileen wears no other palette—were “the
things I’m playing with,” candidates for “my little closet where I keep
the clothes I wear every day.” They were also the source of clothes for
the public appearances that she now makes more frequently and with less
dread. She has gone to China and to meetings of the Clinton Global
Initiative. But she is still, she says, “finding my voice.”

In
the studio, she spoke of another influence on her design that had
almost the significance of the Japanese one: her Catholic-school
uniform. “When I came to New York and had to get dressed to look like a
designer—whatever that meant—I felt troubled by finding things to wear.
So when I started designing clothes I drew on the uniform experience, on
the idea that you can just throw that thing on every morning and don’t
have to think about it.”
The school experience
itself had been less edifying. “I was fairly traumatized by the Catholic
schools I went to,” she said. “I think it is part of my silence thing,
of just always feeling it is safer to say nothing than to figure out
what you think and what you want to say. It was always risky to speak at
school.”“Was there punishment?” I asked.
“There was criticism. There was yelling. They would humiliate you and embarrass you.”
Eileen
asked if I would like to drop in on the meeting downstairs. I would
have preferred to continue the conversation about Catholic schools, but
with uncharacteristic firmness she said, “I know this will interest
you,” and led the way down the stairs.
In the
lunchroom, the long table had been pushed against a wall, and ten or
twelve women wearing Eileen Fisher clothes were sitting on chairs
arranged in a circle. They spoke in the same coded language that Eileen
and Old fell into when they talked about the company. I recognized some
of the terms (“facilitating leaders”) and noted some new ones
(“delegation with transparency,” “agenda-building”), feeling the same
impatient incomprehension. What were they talking about? The meeting
ended when an elegant older woman held up two bronze bells connected by a
cord and rang them. “I ring a bell to remind us of timelessness,” she
said. Then an object, a sort of gilded gourd, was passed from hand to
hand. Each woman said something as she received it. “I feel lighter,”
one woman said. “I feel humbled and honored,” the woman who had rung the
bell said. Her name, I later learned, was Ann Linnea, and she is the
author, with Christina Baldwin, of a book called “The Circle Way: A
Leader in Every Chair” (2010). The book proposes that organizations
conduct their business in circles. You sit around in a circle. This
eliminates hierarchies. Everyone is equal. To focus the mind, there is a
three-part ritual of a “start point,” “check in,” and “check out.” When
the book came out, the Eileen Fisher company was already conducting its
meetings in circles, with its own specially designed bells to mark the
beginning and the end. “It was in the air,” Eileen said of the ritual.
“But ‘The Circle Way’ helped us to refine and more deeply integrate it.”

Back
upstairs, I asked two questions I had been somewhat nervously planning
to ask. The first—yes, you guessed it—was about the cat. In the weeks
between my visits to Irvington, there had been a spell of exceptionally
icy, windy weather, and I had thought of him miserably huddled under the
house in the low temperatures. Had she relented and let him in? No,
there had been no reason to do so. “He has been outside for three years
now. He is the healthiest of my cats,” she said again, and added, “The
first year he was outside was really hard. It was painful. Every time it
would snow or rain I would feel terrible. One freezing-cold day, I
thought, Oh, my poor cat, and picked him up. I was going to hug him a
little and warm him up—but he was so warm, I couldn’t believe it. On
another freezing day, I let him into a stone entryway. I thought I would
just let him be there, and he kind of walked around a bit and then he
stood by the door so that I would let him back out.”

I
asked my second question: Why were Old and Rowe present during my
interviews with Eileen? Eileen promptly answered, “I assume that the
reason you are interested in interviewing me goes beyond me. I sort of
stand for a whole company, and I want to make sure that people are
honored and that I don’t say anything that offends anyone or that hurts
anyone.”
“But the piece is about you,” I said.
“I
know the idea for the company came through me in some way, but it’s
beyond me. I planted the first seed, and now I look around and there’s
this amazing garden. But I’m just an ordinary person. It’s only because I
created this company and these clothes that I’m interesting.”
Old
said smoothly, “Monica and I figure that a lot of conversation will
come up about other aspects of the company and other people you may want
to meet, and, being ears in the room, we can help make that happen in
an easy kind of way. So that’s partly our motivation. It’s wanting to
support whatever your process might be.”
“My story is about Eileen,” I said. “That Eileen Fisher is a real person—”
“—who
puts her cat outside,” Eileen cut in, as we all laughed, perhaps a
little too loudly and heartily. I found myself babbling about the
ethical dilemmas of journalism, about the risk subjects take when they
let journalists into their houses and the pangs journalists feel when
they write their betraying narratives, and saw Eileen and her colleagues
looking at me—as I had looked at them when they talked about their
company—as if I were saying something weird. We were in different
businesses with different vocabularies. I
turned to Eileen. “When you say ‘It’s not about me’ and that you’re not
interesting, that’s a very modest way of talking about yourself.”
“I grew up Catholic,” she said. “You know, the ‘Nobody’s looking at you’ thing.”
“That’s part of Catholicism?”
“That’s
what my mother said all the time. ‘Nobody’s looking at you.’ So for
me—in Catholic school, around my mother—it was just safer to be
invisible.”
Old, with her characteristic
accommodating intelligence, said, “Would it be helpful to you, to both
of you maybe, to have some time without other people in the room?” I was
not surprised when Eileen told me a few weeks later that Old had been
promoted and was now one of the four highest-ranking executives of this
company of a thousand employees that soft-pedals its hierarchy and
doesn’t use the word “executive.”

I
met with Eileen a few more times: once at my apartment, without Old and
Rowe, and with no appreciable difference in the character of our
conversation; then at the company’s corporate headquarters, on Fifth
Avenue; and, finally, in Irvington, at a celebration in an Eileen Fisher
store at the river’s edge, called the Lab Store, which was reopening
after being flooded by Sandy. At the celebration, Eileen was waiting for
me at the door in an especially fetching outfit of black harem pants,
boots, a charcoal-gray cardigan over a gray asymmetrical top, and a
light-gray scarf. (Eileen knows how to wear scarves the way women in
Paris know how to wear them and American women almost touchingly don’t.)

The store was full of people, some sifting through racks of clothes or
waiting in line for a dressing room and others conversing, with glasses
of champagne in their hands. It was a nice occasion. Eileen made a
gracious speech of greeting and introduced a dance performance by
students and teachers from a local dance studio. After the performance,
people came up to tell her how much they loved her clothes and admired
her. A woman with a cane who said she had just turned eighty-five was
among them. She was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes from another time,
which suited her well—an unobtrusive outfit of slacks, shell top, and
jacket of an easy fit. The younger women in the room wearing today’s
less self-effacing asymmetrical designs didn’t always carry them off. It
occurred to me that Eileen looks better in her clothes than anyone
else. What she selects from her little closet and puts on for the day is
a work of design itself. In Manhattan, there are small enclaves where
almost every woman looks chic—Madison Avenue in the Seventies and
Eighties, for example. Almost everywhere else, if you walk along the
street and look at what women are wearing, you have to laugh at the
disparity between the effort that goes into shopping for clothes and the
effect this effort achieves.

During the dance
performance, Eileen pointed out an attractive bearded man standing
across the room. This was “the new man in my life,” Bill Kegg, who is a
leadership coach, a profession that is “sort of like therapy, but he’s
not a therapist. It’s more about moving forward.” Eileen has herself
been in therapy for more than thirty years. “It changed my life,” she
said. “Without the therapist I had many years ago, there’s no way I
could have started this business. She didn’t say, ‘Don’t do that,’ like
my mother did. ‘What are you thinking—you can’t even sew.’ But she
questioned. ‘What is motivating you? What is it about?’ She saved my
life. Without her I would be a totally different person.” In recent
years, Eileen has added yoga, meditation, and what she calls “bodywork
stuff” to her repertoire of soul maintenance. She described “this thing
called breath work”: “You lie on the floor breathing in a specific way, a
kind of heavy breathing in that gets you into a sort of dream state.
You go through all this stuff and let it go. It’s like thirty years of
therapy in one hour.”
Eileen left the Catholic
Church during college, and now attends weekly meetings of the
Westchester Buddhist Center (the meetings are held at her offices in
Irvington). Four years ago, she went on a weeklong meditation retreat in
Colorado with her children, now twenty and twenty-four. When I said I
was surprised that she took the children, she said, “The kids loved it.
They don’t like to talk. They’re like me.” Eileen
has always been good with money—she says it comes out of her early
affinity for math—but she doesn’t care about it for its own sake, and
she isn’t a big spender. “My accountant always says ‘Spend more money.’ I
love my home. I’m comfortable there. But I don’t have a lot of needs.
Maybe because I grew up the way I did. I like what I like. I travel a
little bit. But I had to be talked into travelling first class. I just
see myself as ordinary, one of the group. Being treated as special feels
a little weird to me. It’s something I guess I have to get over at some
point.” (It could be argued that Eileen has got over it. She tore down
the perfectly good house that was on the site of the present one to
build a house she liked better, and in many other respects enjoys the
privileges of the one per cent. It should be added that she is a
political liberal.)

At the
Eileen Fisher headquarters, she and I and Old and Rowe sat in a circle
with five other women who had been assembled to talk with me about their
functions and had titles such as Facilitating Leader of Design Process
and People and Creative, Inspiration, and Research Director. The meeting
started with the obligatory ringing of a bell (this one was a flat
metal thing encased in wood, and was struck like a gong) and a moment of
silence, with eyes closed, like the moment of silent prayer in a
Protestant church service. The bell was struck again to end the silence.
The women were likable and interesting. Helen Oji had been a painter
before she joined the company, Candice Reffe a poet, Rebecca Perrin a
dancer. The feeling of camaraderie that often arises when women gather
in a group arose from this gathering. At one point, I asked a question:
“Eileen said there was a ratio of eighty per cent women to twenty per
cent men in the company. But I don’t see any men around here. Where is
the twenty per cent?” “In Secaucus,” someone exclaimed, to hoots of
laughter from the rest. There is a warehouse in Secaucus where the men
apparently are kept.

Eileen
talked about a conference from which she had just returned, of heads of
what she called like-minded companies, such as Whole Foods and the
Container Store, held at the Esalen retreat, in California. Fifteen men
and seven women had been invited, and on the second day one of the men
observed that only one woman had spoken during the entire proceedings.
“It wasn’t me,” Eileen said, as the group laughed. She went on, “I
thanked him for saying that and said that I had felt frozen and
incapable of speech. I know that some of this is me and comes from the
way I was brought up. But I also think that men and women talk
differently. I don’t understand it exactly. Men talk faster. There’s
more like a debate style. I felt I wouldn’t think fast enough.”
Eileen
took me to the tenth floor of the building, where designers and
merchandisers do their work, a vast loft space of calm, complex
activity. As we walked through the “amazing garden” that had arisen from
the seeds she planted twenty-eight years earlier with her four linen
pieces, Eileen would pause before a rack of clothes to touch a sleeve or
take the fabric between her fingers, making appreciative murmurs, as
someone on a garden tour might make standing before an especially
handsome specimen. There was nothing in her manner to suggest that she
was anything but a pleased tourist.

A
few weeks later, I returned to 111 Fifth Avenue to take a closer look
at the tenth floor. My guide this time was Monica Rowe, who took me down
a long central corridor lined with racks of sample garments and flanked
on both sides by large partitioned spaces with windows, where designers
sat at computers or drafting tables or in discussion groups around
conference tables. These spaces—with one conspicuous exception—were in
keeping with what one thinks of as the Eileen Fisher aesthetic of
elegant plainness. The exception, called the “trend and color studio,”
was like a mocking rebuttal of this aesthetic.

The room was full of
brightly colored images and objects, among them reproductions of master
paintings (Bruegel’s “Harvesters” was one, and Vermeer’s “Girl with a
Pearl Earring” another), a mobile of pictures of birds of brilliant
plumage, bins of jumbled fabrics such as you might rifle through in a
thrift shop, innumerable small things you might find in the home of a
hoarder of small things, baskets overflowing with sparkling ribbons and
lace, and a huge ball made of orange cotton strips wound around each
other that Chris Costan, the ruler of this domain of color and excess,
had found in a market in India.

Costan
is a small, pretty woman who is also a painter, and who repudiates the
Eileen Fisher aesthetic as decisively in her person as in her
surrounding. Her outfit on the day of my visit—a short puffily pleated
beige cotton skirt worn with a horizontally striped
pinkish-beige-and-black jersey top and black tights—was clearly not of
Eileen Fisher provenance, and her jet-black hair was arranged in one of
the most complicated hair styles I have ever seen, involving a long
braid over one shoulder, a high pompadour rising from the forehead, and
an assortment of fancy combs and clips appended at irregular intervals
to the braid and to the back of the head.
Costan’s
title is color designer, and her job is to create a palette for the
clothing line for each season. She draws inspiration, she says, from the
fabrics and pictures and tchotchkes she collects, as well as, though to
a lesser degree, from books that forecast color trends in fashion. Her
palettes are represented on “swatch charts”—sheets of paper on which
tiny squares of colored fabric are pasted—that are presented to the
designers and merchandisers, who may or may not accept them in their
entirety.
When I asked Costan if she thought of
herself as a rebellious force in the company, she said, “Yes, I totally
see myself that way. I like what’s unusual and unexpected and different.
I look for colors I find cool at the moment. I’m interested in trends. I
create a story. I come from a discipline where everything means
something. I’m not sure everyone around here cares. But I’m also a good
girl. I fit in with the culture of the company. They’ve allowed me a lot
of latitude because they like what I do. I feel appreciated—though
sometimes I get annoyed.” A recent source of annoyance was the rejection
of one of the colors she proposed—the “wildly trendy” color called
cosmetic or skin tone—which happened to be the color that in my
ignorance I called pinkish-beige when describing her striped jersey. “I
wear Eileen Fisher designs sometimes, and I really like them,” she said.
“But my style is quirkier. I always want to be different. It’s my
rebelliousness.” As
Rowe led me to another part of the floor, I recalled a passage in an
Eileen Fisher brochure entitled “Simply—to Be Ourselves”:

The
underlying philosophy of our design—no constraints, freedom of
expression—extends to the company itself, which is run in a loosely
structured manner that allows for an open exchange of ideas. Every
employee is encouraged to give input to any area, no matter their
position or expertise. The individual is valued for the total picture of
who they are and what they can contribute.

I
also thought of something Eileen had said about today’s company and its
leadership: “I don’t feel like I need to be there anymore. I feel like
they’re my full-grown adult children and they do an amazing job and they
don’t need me.” Rowe, who was wearing Kelly-green trousers (“No,
they’re from my own clothes,” she said when I asked if they were of
Eileen Fisher design), paused before a short rack of garments with a
sign on it reading:

EILEEN’S SAMPLES

DO NOT TOUCH

These
were the clothes for Mom’s closet, in the obligatory black and gray and
white, and as we stood before them the image of Eileen, in all her
delicacy and beauty, wafted out of them like an old, expensive scent. ♦

Janet Malcolm has been writing for The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published her poem “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.”